Category Archives: Technology

In Flight WiFi

OK, this is pretty cool … I’m on my way to the COMMON Conference in Orlando … and, just before the flight leaves, Ginny sends a text telling me that the blogs are down.

I use the TouchTerm app on my iPhone … but can’t figure out what is going on.

Luckily the flight I’m on has WiFi available … $9.95 for the flight.

Well, I have nothing better to do on the fight (other than read my Wired magazine, which isn’t all that interesting), so I plunk down the fee and log in.

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SSD and D630

A few weeks ago I saw a a good deal on a 80gb Solid State Disk (SSD) from Dane Elec at NewEgg (officially “DANE-ELEC DA-SDM25-80G-N-T-MK 1.8″ with 2.5″ adapter SSD Migration Kit”).

The unit is actually an Intel X18-M SSD in a 1.8″ to 2.5″ SATA adapter.

It only cost $149, so I got one.

I had high hopes for improved disk performance and faster startup & shutdown.

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‘Tis The Season to Upgrade! (or not)

Yes, it’s that time of year again … UPGRADE TIME!

With the release of Fedora 12 a few months ago, I’m taking the holiday break from work to get my servers up to a more current version of Linux.

The fact that Fedora 10, the version of Linux I am currently running, is no longer going to be updated added a little more incentive.

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Report as SPAM

It’s nice that many of the major mail providers give you the ability to report a message you’ve received as spam … but some of them make it far TOO easy to report something as spam.

I’ve noticed that many of the big names put the “Report as spam” button way too close to the delete button.

Let’s take a look at some of the providers …

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Activate AHCI in Win 7

Last week I decided to start playing around with Windows 7 on my laptop … just to see how it’s going to work.

Luckily I have a spare SATA hard drive, so there was no risk that I would damage anything permanently.   If the Windows 7 install went bad, I could simply switch back to XP on the original hard drive.

Well, it’s been a little more than a week with Windows 7 and I’m quite impressed.

One thing I noticed is that the hard drive controller wasn’t for the AHCI I thought was configured.   Then I remembered, when I had the motherboard replaced due to the video problems, the default hard drive controller settings would be in place … and the default is to use ATA instead of AHCI.

Theoretically, AHCI should give me better performance than standard ATA.

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Splitting the NID

For the past few weeks we’ve had a lot of static & interference on our home phone line … it doesn’t effect the Vonage line, so I figured it was coming from outside the house.

Well, it turns out the ‘NID Splitter’ we have in the phone box is giving out.     A NID Splitter is a device that plugs into the Network Interface Device that acts as a DSL filter for all the inside phone wiring.   A NID is the box where the telephone companies wiring interfaces with the house wiring.   Everything on the ‘Customer’ side of the NID is is your responsibility, anything on the other side of the NID is the telephone companies responsiblity.

It’s called a NID Splitter because it lets you split the phone line signal into two parts … one part that goes directly to the DSL modem, and the other half that goes to the house phone wiring.   The NID Splitter filters out the voice data on the phone line so it doesn’t interfere with the DSL signal.

Since I don’t have a replacement NID Splitter I tried a few things …

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